THE GENIUS OF THE DREAM? Stanley R. Palombo At the climax of A Midsummer Nights Dream, Demetrius is released from? his transferential infatuation with Hermia. This happens when he awakens? from a dream that has successfully matched his current feelings for Hermia? with a repressed libidinal fantasy of childhood. This example illustrates? how condensation in dreams functions adaptively in matching a new rience with previously stored representations of related events in the past. It also illustrates the ability of the matching process to go beyond the row logical categories of waking thought to reach deeper levels of ence otherwise inaccessible to the dreamer. This ability accounts for the? important role played by dreaming in the creative process generally and in? the day-to-day working-through process of psychoanalytic therapy. Freud's idea that dreams are an inner dramatization of the dreamer's? unfulfilled wishes is, of course, much older than Freud. We find it in the? work of the Greek tragedians and\n Shakespeare's plays. Near the end? of A Midsummer Nights Dream for example, Theseus offers what we? recognize as the Freudian viewpoint on the tales told by the young lovers? about their adventures of the previous night in the woods outside Athens: Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy. Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!(V, 18-2 In our post-Freudian language, the tales are fantasies of wish fulfillment, psychodynamically indistinguishable from dreams. Like dreams, they? reflect the drive states of the dreamers, rather than the actual events they? have experienced. But Theseus's new bride, Hippolyta, feels that this pretation does not do justice to the lovers' tales. She says: Stanley R. Palombo, MD Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington? University. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol. No. Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis PALOMBO But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable.(V, 23-2 There are many indications that Shakespeare shares Hippolyta's position in? this controversy. Most importantly, her view follows naturally from the? psychological movement of the play, which turns on the resolution of? Demetrius's neurotic transference to Hermia through the therapeutic effect? of a dream experience. The emotional climax of the play occurs when? Demetrius becomes fully conscious of this change. The realization comes? to him as he replies to Theseus's questioning, just after awakening from the? night of enchantment: I wot not by what power-But by some power it is-my love to Hermia, Melted as the snow, seems to me now? As the remembrance of an idle gaud? Which in my childhood I did dote upon; And all the faith, the virtue of my heart, The object and the pleasure of mine eye, Is only Helena. To her, my lord, Was I betrothed ere I saw Hermia; But like a sickness did I loathe this food: But as in health, come to my natural taste, Now I do wish it, love it, long for it, And will for evermore be true to it.(IV, 163-1 Shakespeare only hints at the nature of the power that cured Demetrius. But he seems to be suggesting that, in order to understand it in depth, his? readers would need a dream theory more resonant with Hippolyta's tion than with Theseus's traditionally Freudian view. For those of Shakespeare's readers who have grown up in the Freudian? era, this may seem a bit puzzling. But an examination of Freud's basic …